It happened because it had to happen, because history dictated that it happen.
Barack Obama, the newly elected president of the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu, the newly resurrected prime minister of Israel, were fated to meet.

“Why is it,” Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev was asked, “that Shavuot is also referred to as Atzeret? After all, the Torah uses the term atzeret only in association with the festival of Shemini Atzeret, not Shavuot.”

On May 12 I was privileged to be a witness to history when Pope Benedict XVI visited the Kotel. Earlier, while standing on Mount Nebo, Jordan, the spot from which Moses viewed the Holy Land, Benedict spoke of the “inseparable bond” between Catholics and Jews.

The impact of opera on contemporary politics is fairly limited these days. Unlike the 19th century when new operas by composers like Giuseppe Verdi would often be seen as important political statements, the contemporary lyric theater is usually the preserve of an elite that most people don’t care about. But every once in a while something can happen at an opera house that makes its way onto the news pages.

During the seven weeks between Pesach and Shavuot we are commanded to count every day and make a daily blessing. This mitzvah of counting the Omer illustrates the process of advancing up the ladder of freedom which began by God redeeming us from Egypt and came to its culmination at Mount Sinai where the Torah was given.

The first Palestinian state, commonly called Jordan, was carved out of the Palestine Mandate and equipped with a refugee Saudi royal family. Today Jordan exists mainly under the protection of the U.S. and Israel, and the majority of its population of Palestinian Arabs supports Osama bin Laden at a higher percentage than do the citizens of Pakistan.

Seven hundred years before Israeli paratroopers restored the Old City of Jerusalem to Jewish hands, a great sage was rejuvenating Jewish life in the holy city, building the cornerstone for many generations to follow.

There is no question in my mind that so-called anti-Zionism serves as a fig leaf for Jew-hatred.
There is no other explanation.
I know of no other country whose legitimacy is as relentlessly questioned and undermined as is Israel’s. You would think that those who espouse the love of human rights and rejection of violence and government oppression would attack, with proper fury, countries like Congo, Sudan, Jordan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Cuba, Libya, Dubai, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Venezuela, and of course the most repressive country on the planet, North Korea.

With renewed urgency, the Obama administration seeks to resolve the states of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and neighboring Muslim states on one hand, and America and the Islamic Republic of Iran on the other.

Today, under the Obama administration – as yesterday under the Bush administration – U.S. policy toward the Arab war on Israel is largely based on the notion that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction are genuine moderates who reject terrorism and accept Israel’s right to exist, and are therefore committed to building a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.

The anti-terror campaign made a mockery out of any concern for human rights. Collateral damage and injury to innocent bystanders were regular and common features of the campaign. Anti-terror paramilitary fighters and forces routinely engaged in torture of captured terrorists.

He did a photo-op with former president Bush – twice. He made the cover of New York magazine. He was the subject of the well-received documentary “Orthodox Stance.” He boasts an unblemished record of 29-0 and is currently the number-one ranked World Boxing Association contender for the junior welterweight championship of the world.

Every American, obviously, has heard of Ronald Reagan, and Reagan historians have heard of Bill Clark. Clark was Reagan’s close aide, who, more than any other, laid the foundation for Cold War victory.

If you were to attend a convention of mental health professionals who specialize in treating abuse victims, and if you were to ask the attendees what steps or initiatives they would like to see implemented to protect children from predators and to assist those who have already been victimized, you would probably get responses like:

January's Operation Cast Lead, launched against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, was made necessary by the earlier unilateral withdrawal from Gaza when the entire Jewish community there was forcibly evicted by the Kadima government of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

Nearly every day I walk past the large new building in the heart of Jewish Golders Green being constructed for Jewish Care, a mainstream Anglo-Jewish charity. It always reminds me of the large Jewish Community Center the Conservative movement erected in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia in the early 1960s – that neighborhood then being one of the larger Jewish communities in the city. Within a few years the building was on the market because the area had rapidly changed from being nearly all Jewish to nearly all black. I always wonder if this new building is an omen of changes to come in England.

My father, Chaskel Tydor, was among the Jewish prisoners liberated in the Nazi camp of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Born to a chassidic family in Bochnia, Poland in 1903, the year Orville Wright first successfully flew an aircraft at Kitty Hawk, he had grown up in Germany where his family had fled at the outbreak of the First World War, marrying and raising a family.